We were well aware that Novell had put itself on the market, coyly winking at passers-by, displaying its... Assets. VMware was a contender, but things have played out entirely different: Novell has been bought by Attachmate Corp., with a Microsoft-led consortium buying unspecified intellectual property from Novell.

"I wouldn't count on stuff like mono and gnome not being affected and being used somehow to restrain software freedom, whether it's Attachmate or MSFT owning it now by proxy.

That's the good thing about open source software, even if Novell/Attachmate stops developing/distributing Mono or GNOME, the already released source code will always be there for people to use under the same license. No one can retroactively change the license on the software people already have. "

Parts of Mono do not have free software licenses. Most of it does (most of the framework CLI, C# etc is a standard allowed to be implemented by anyone), but critical parts of .NET, implemented in Mono, have been held back by Microsoft as proprietary technology.

Microsoft/Novel made a deal that allowed Novel to develop Mono and Moonlight ... for Novel's SLED customers. Microsoft still held the rights to the still-proprietary parts of Mono and Moonlight.

I see no reason for Microsoft to want to buy back from Novel rights that Microsoft already owned in the first place.

Dude, I don't like mono and I know this isn't true.
The 'key parts of .NET' of which you speak are probably the winforms elements and other things that aren't part of the C# standard.
Those _are_ free software, but they're not exempt from patent suits, because they're not part of the C# standard.
MS extended patent-violation protection to any complete C# implementation. I don't recall if said implementation can or cannot extend the standard (the problem is that their implementation _does_ extend the standard. You can be compliant or compatible).

So, over the past week or so, you've been incorrect, vitriolic, and annoyingly persistent.
Is there an equivalent to /ignore?

Dude, I don't like mono and I know this isn't true. The 'key parts of .NET' of which you speak are probably the winforms elements and other things that aren't part of the C# standard. Those _are_ free software, but they're not exempt from patent suits, because they're not part of the C# standard. MS extended patent-violation protection to any complete C# implementation. I don't recall if said implementation can or cannot extend the standard (the problem is that their implementation _does_ extend the standard. You can be compliant or compatible). So, over the past week or so, you've been incorrect, vitriolic, and annoyingly persistent. Is there an equivalent to /ignore?

The code of all of Mono is free software ... but there is no patent grant associated with its license.

The technology of most of .NET is a standard (e.g. CLI and C#) is able to be implemented by anyone, and it comes under Microsoft's open Specification Promise. These parts of Mono are not an issue.

However, there are indeed parts of .NET, which are implemented in Mono, which do NOT fall under Microsoft's open Specification Promise. These parts are Microsoft proprietary technology. These parts of Mono are an issue.

Releasing the code for implementations of these parts under a free software license does not mean that they are free software. Microsoft has made no promise whatsoever not to sue over these non-Windows implemntations of its proprietary technologies.

The 'key parts of .NET' of which you speak are probably the winforms elements and other things that aren't part of the C# standard.

The 'C# standards' you speak of (which is probably the ECMA CLI specifications) are not exempt from being patented. If they are patented, now or in the future, the ECMA simply washes its hands of the standard.

In addition, the CLI specifications within the CLI give you pretty much nothing that allows you to get a practical and workable CLI implementation. Mono had to reverse engineer a certain amount.